The Bottom Line: Filaments is a hypnotic psychological thriller that pulses with intelligence and dread. Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Blake Crouch.
Filaments begins in a crowded college bar, where exhausted biologist Dr. Thea Pappa is reluctantly celebrating a long-awaited research grant with her graduate students. Amid the blur of cheers and clinking glasses, Thea’s sense of triumph quickly gives way to unease when her phone buzzes again and again with calls from her domineering aunt, Maria. When she finally answers, she’s summoned home amid fears for her mother’s sanity.
Within hours, Thea’s carefully controlled academic life is upended. Her mother is indeed unstable and two local men are missing. Her mother Helen, a brilliant but damaged woman who self-medicates with the spores of bog mushrooms, lives under Maria’s wary eye.
Author KZK has created a perfectly claustrophobic and tactile setting in the creation of Sellers, Minnesota, where the Pappa women are regarded with equal parts fascination and fear. That goes double for KZK’s rendering of the family’s sagging bogland house. Thea finds it overtaken by vials of amber liquid, notebooks filled with impossible equations, and the faint, fungal odor of decay. Thea’s scientific instinct is to categorize and explain, but nothing about her mother’s condition fits neatly into pathology.
KZK builds tension not through spectacle but through atmosphere. Thea’s encounters with childhood friend Lina reignite buried rivalries and draw her deeper into the mystery. Everywhere she turns, there’s the often unspoken feeling that she’s uncovering things that might be best left buried.
As Thea sifts through Helen’s research, unsettling parallels between her mother’s notes and her own scientific work seem to emerge. Will the same curiosity that made her a respected academic undo her? The novel’s suspense builds less around what happened to the missing men than around whether Thea can trust the evidence of her senses.
For fans of mystery and psychological thrillers, Filaments offers an intoxicating mix of scientific intrigue and gothic unease. KZK transforms familiar genre elements – missing persons, family secrets, small-town suspicion – into something more intimate and unsettling. The questions it raises about inheritance, belief, and the limits of rational thought are what truly keep the pages turning.
